STEVE KORNACKI, MSNBC ANCHOR: The prognosis for post-shutdown Washington isn`t good, and there is a reason. We`re all feeling a little lonely, so we`re special glad you decided to join us today. Spend any time looking for the political middle these days, you`ll find yourself in a no man`s land, wondering where anybody else has gone. Was our system designed to work in an era of hyperpolarization? We`ll explain in a minute.

Also, he is marching even farther to the right the way for the Republican Party to win back the White House? There is a real time test playing out right now and the results aren`t very encouraging for the Tea Party. We`ll tell you about that test in a little bit. You know how every political scandal gets branded a gate, as we mark the anniversary of the Saturday night massacre, we`ll revisit the scandal that started it all and we`ll talk about what it has to say about presidential authority today. And finally, other political talk shows may promise you they`ll have no spin, but we`ll be embracing the concept this morning in a very literal way. We`ll tell you about that in a little bit.

But first, this is the bull weevil, it`s a minuscule beetle, it`s just six millimeters in length with a huge snout designed to gnaw through cotton buds, the tiny pests. Since no pesticide can fully eradicate it, it has the power to destroy thousands of acres of cotton bite by bite. Bull weevil crippled the Southern economy throughout the 1920s and then in the 1950s it made a comeback as a political symbol. There have been the donkeys and there have been the elephants for decades, but now Southern Democrats who oppose their national party`s shifts toward racial integration and more liberal economic agenda were proudly calling themselves bull weevils. Moniker picked up more steam in 1980s when Democrats controlled the House. Massachusetts liberal Tip O`Neill was the speaker. But because there were dozens of Southern bull weevils happy to buck their party, President Ronald Reagan actually had functional control of the chamber for the first two years of his presidency. And bull weevils of the 1980s were Democrats like Larry McDonald, who was named chairman of the far right John Birch Society in 1983. McDonald appeared on a very early, very funny to watch now version of CNN`s "Crossfire" that year and faced questions about the Birch Society`s attempts to steady a right wing takeover of local parent teacher associations.

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TOM BRADEN, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back to "Crossfire." I guess there`s the new chairman recently named chairman of the John Birch Society. Congressman Larry McDonald, the Democrat from Georgia. Mr. McDonald, your predecessor believed that the PTA was too left wing and that - and John Birch Society at one time tried to infiltrate it or so he said, used the word infiltrate. Is that part of your program now?

LARRY MCDONALD: Well, I think when the PTA comes out in this program for the test ban treaty and when the PTA comes out for gun control, and comes out for others national legislative programs that have been linked with liberaldom, having nothing to do with education of our children, like many people are wondering what in the world is the PTA doing and that includes members of the John Birch Society.

BRIDEN: Well, I wonder about you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: Yes, that was a Democratic member of Congress and there were a lot like him back then. Larry McDonald was tragically killed just a few months after that taping. When the Soviets shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, he left behind dozens of conservative Democrats in Congress just like him. Around the same time, on the other side of the aisle, there were Northern liberal Republicans who voted a lot more like Democrats than the bull weevils did. Take, for example, New York Republican Senator Jacob Javitz. After two decades in the Senate as a Republican, he was defeated in 1980 by a primary challenger from the right, Al D`Amato. But the Liberal Party, an old institution of New York state politics, had a ballot line of its own and offered its endorsement to Javitz, who took it and ran against the motto in the general election.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Jacob Javitz, 24 years in the Senate, and D`Amato made much of Javitz age, health and liberal views.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, I see you`re wearing a Javitz button.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah, he`s my candidate.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you kidding? He`ll be 82 if he finishes his term and he voted with Jimmy Carter 82 percent of the time.

ANNOUNCER: So, now Javitz is officially a liberal, running on the state`s Liberal Party ticket. But still planning to vote for Reagan and finding no contradiction in that.

SEN. JACOB JAVITZ (R) NEW YORK: I will appeal to all the people of New York on the ground that I can the best represent them all, whether they`re Democrats, Republicans, Liberal Party, independent, conservative. I can serve them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: Javitz candidacy ended up splitting the Democratic vote and it made Al D`Amato a U.S. Senator. But still, a sizable contingent of liberal Republicans in Congress back in those days and like conservative Democrats, they also self-identified with an insect, the gypsy moth. (INAUDIBLE), he was a liberal Republican from Connecticut said he chose the term because the leaf eating gypsy moth is as much of a nuisance in the North as the bull weevil is in the South. Well, these metaphorical pests, these political factions tormented their parties throughout the `70s and the `80s, even into the 1990s. They`re now mostly extinct. By and large liberal Republicans either switched parties or lost elections. The same is true for the bull weevils. And Democratic and Republican Parties were once big tents that incorporated extensive geographic cultural, even ideological diversity. But that era looks more and more like a historical fluke, a blip. It played out in the decades after civil rights legislation upended the two political parties.

When Democrat Lyndon Johnson championed the passage of civil rights legislation, he was backed by Northern Republicans, and he was bucked by conservative Southern Democrats. For a while, these progressive Republicans and conservative Democrats stuck with their party heritage. But steadily over the ensuing decades, liberal northerners migrated to the Democrats, conservative southerners to the Republicans. And each national party became more ideologically uniform. And voters have recognized this shift. 40 years ago, a third of voters would split their votes for Congress and for the president between the two parties. They were ticket splitters. Back then there were both Democrats and Republicans that appealed to the same individual voter. Compare that with last year when not even one in ten voters split their votes between the parties. It`s a record low. If you`re right of center today, if you identify with the conservative tribe, with red America, there is little reason to vote anything but Republican, and likewise, if you`re left - If you`re identify with the left of tribe, with blue America, there is little reason for you to vote anything but Democratic.

The parties have basically sorted themselves out which leaves few natural bipartisan coalitions in Congress anymore. One party believes in the right to abortion, the other doesn`t. One party believes in large cuts to the social safety net, the other doesn`t. One party believes in raising taxes on the wealthy, the other doesn`t. So, it encourages the two parties to function as distinct entities that never really cooperate, that never really work together. But are at war with each other. And that means using every legislative tool to fight the other party. In the Obama era, the Republicans have taken this concept to a whole new level. They have perfected obstructionism. First, they killed off simple majority rule in the Senate. The upper chamber now requires a super majority of 60 votes to pass pretty much anything. Senate Republicans have also effectively hamstrung the executive branch with filibuster threats against dozens of Obama`s nominees. And now with Republicans controlling the House, they managed to shut down the government for the first time in 17 years. The first time since the last time a Democratic president and Republican House tried to co-exist. And they also nearly caused the U.S. Treasury to default, twice.

A party that has zero interest in cooperating with the other party, a party whose base draws its energy from the conviction that it must fight the other party on everything has the power to do all of this in a political system that depends on some level of bipartisan cooperation when there is divided government. And as Washington emerges from the shutdown drama this past month, as we all ask what now, well, it looks like we`re going to be stuck in this mess for a while. It`s hard for Democrats to look back at the last three plus years and not conclude that the only way that it will accomplish anything substantial is if they control the White House, a 60 vote super majority in the Senate and the House, all at once, like they did for part of Obama`s first two years in office.

But the absolute earliest they could take back the House is 13 months from now, in the 2014 midterms. The odds of them pulling that off, even though the GOP is racking up epically terrible poll numbers right now, the odds of that are not very good. Divided government is very likely to be the rule for the rest of the Obama presidency and maybe well after it.

We dodged a default earlier this month and the government is open for business again. Is there any reason to think the gridlock that has defined the last three years will end in any meaningful way anytime soon? Was this system of ours designed to work and in the time we`re now living, in a time of ideologically sorted out parties, of ideologically sorted out voters, a time of intense polarization? We`ll talk about it, I want to bring in L. Joy Williams, she`s a political strategist and founder of the public affair from L.J.W of Community Strategies, we have Reid Wilson who covers state politics and policy for the "Washington Post" govbit blog. Robert George, columnist with the "New York Post" and former aide to then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Norm Ornstein, journalist and co-author of the book "It`s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism." Also a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

And Norm, I`ll start with you. Because I think I bored heavily from what you have written in the last couple of years about the state of Washington right now, and specifically how things have changed in the Republican Party, in the Obama era. And I guess the question I just start with you is looking ahead, taking from now to the 2014 midterms, we`re out of the shutdown, we`re away from the default drama, is there any reason to expect that anything in Washington is going to change in the next year before the 2014 midterms?

NORM ORNSTEIN, "IT`S EVEN WORSE THAN IT LOOKS": It gets harder and harder, Steve, partly because the midterms approach and especially over the next six months. An awful lot of Republicans and now we see a number of them in the Senate fearing primary challenges, all pulling them even further to the right. And whether that results in any impetus towards a compromise, it is hard to see it happening. You know, the frustrating thing here is as we move towards this budget conference with the deadline of mid-December, there is every reason objectively pragmatically for the two parties to get this debt issue off the table for now. It`s not working to anybody`s advantage. And it is not difficult if you`re in normal politics to find the kind of compromise and give and take that could get us there. But there is this huge obstacle in the way and that is the polarization that you describe so well.

KORNACKI: And we can illustrate the polarization. Bear with me in a second. We have a graph that sort of explains the evolution of the House. This takes it from the last 30 years, 1982 to 2012 and it sort of shows the ideological overlap in the House, where you basically - you take the most liberal Republican, the most conservative Democrat, and how many members from both parties sort of fit in between there. So, that`s where you - you have a lot of room for sort of bipartisanship. And I mean look at that. 30 years ago, there were 344 combined between the two parties. And the last year, the last time they took this, 11, that`s - I mean - that`s what we`re left with. And I just - it leaves me with the question that I started to raise there, I mean was this system of ours even really designed to function when the two parties are sort of completely sorted out and separate like that.

L. JOY WILLIAMS, POLITICAL STRATEGIST: Well, some of our founding fathers said this, you know, talked about sort of the difficulty with people aligning with the party, and people trying to hold on to party ideals instead of thinking for themselves or thinking what is best for the country. This is what they feared. John Adams, George Washington in his farewell speech talked about parties and people following that leadership, or following those hard lines and not particularly following what is good for the country.

And we can`t have people -- we can`t function as a government where people who are in government don`t believe in government, you know. It is difficult to do that. And even though you can see sort of in Congress, sort of this ideological shift, the American people are not like that. People are identified as independents, you know, 37 percent, I think of Americans identify sort of in the middle or moderate, so the American people aren`t like that. And so, they`re not even listening to the people they`re supposed to be governing.

ROBERT GEORGE, "THE NEW YORK POST": Well, the question is, though, maybe they are, because one of the things your initial segment didn`t really focus on is the fact that on the one hand, as you said, people are identifying more as independent. In fact, as the parties actually technically are shrinking, the people who think of themselves as independent has grown. But the other side of it is they`re also ideologically and geographically self-selecting. So people who end up going to like, say, Texas and the South, you know, they start to -- even if they didn`t necessarily think of themselves as conservative when they got there, they start associating with various folks and then they become more conservative. And the same thing happens to those people who end up in blue parts of the country as well. So, it is not surprising that they then end up sending people to Congress who start reflecting their values.

KORNACKI: You get to the point that I`m kind of interested in, I`m sort of -- I`m trying to figure out, is there such a thing and really was there ever such a thing as a real big vibrant political middle. Because like, Robert, you can point out that the number of people who are registered as independents or who will say they`re independents grows, but as we also said in the introduction there, ticket splitting, people who go out and vote, you know, I`m voting for Romney for president, I`m voting for, you know, a Democrat for Congress, and trying to think of a liberal Democrat, I`m blanking, but basically - you know .

(CROSSTALK)

(LAUGHTER)

KORNACKI: Carolyn Maloney, there is one. But it doesn`t happen anymore. And it just makes me wonder was there ever much of a political middle there or was it just more confusion?

REID WILSON, WASHINGTONPOST.COM: I think there was, and you got to it a little bit in the beginning. There used to be four parties in Congress. There were the liberal Republicans and the liberal Democrats, the conservative Republicans and the conservative Democrats. What we`re seeing now is a -- the parties themselves are becoming more homogenous. That`s what "The National Journal" chart shows, that their vote rankings are showing that Republicans are voting with Republicans more often, Democrats with Democrats more often. And that reflects, I think, a - sort of a broadening of how we play politics these days. All politics is local, Tip O`Neill said. It is not really anymore. Because the conservative activists and the liberal activists in Washington, D.C. or wherever they happen to be based, I`m thinking of Erick Erickson and red state - redstate.com, it can start playing in - yeah, moveon.org, all those - can start playing in primaries where they`re completely separate from their thousands of miles away.

I was really struck by a piece in yesterday`s "Washington Post" by my colleague Paul Cane who went down to Tennessee, he was following Lamar Alexander around, and Lamar Alexander`s opponent, one of the state reps who was trying to primary Alexander from the right, said that he would really have a great chance if all the outside money from Washington would come in. The outside groups, Heritage Action Fund, Club for Growth, groups like that get involved in that campaign. You now have a guy running for office in Tennessee who is depending on money from Washington instead of building a grassroots movement from Tennessee.

ORNSTEIN: There is a couple of problems here, though, worth pointing out. You can have sharp ideological polarization and partisan polarization, the plenty of issues which are not inherently ideological if you want to work together. What has happened in part two is the phenomenon of the permanent campaign. If you look at that era of the bull weevils and the gypsy moths, the Democrats had hegemony in the House, because they had the conservative Democrats join with the liberals to make a majority for 40 consecutive years. For a good portion of that, Republicans decided that the only way they could participate was to compromise and work together. After Newt Gingrich took the Republicans into a majority in 1994, every election since you can imagine the majority shifting and now you get this conscious effort. If we work with them, it may reduce our chances of being in the majority.

So what you`ve seen now -- it gets back to your original point and really what is the thesis of the book, you have a conscious parliamentary minority party on the Republicans. They`ve decided even in areas where they were for things last month, they`re not going to be for them now because it might work to the advantage of Barack Obama and Democrats. How you operate and make policy in a situation like that is the dilemma we face and is putting enormous stress on the system and on the economy.

KORNACKI: And we`ll pick this up after the break, one of the issues there is that seems to have been if you look at Mitch McConnell, even some of the public statements he made at the start of the Obama presidency, sort of - there was an intentional calculation on the part of the Republicans, but it was a calculation that in some ways has paid off and is continuing to pay off for them politically. Even though they didn`t win the White House - We`ll pick that up after this.

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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OLYMPIA SNOWE, FORMER U.S. SENATOR: Certainly there are broad elements within the party now that are driving their own agenda for their own advantage, irrespective of, you know, what implications it has for the Republican Party. And certainly this isn`t a party that I recognize and the party that I joined when I, you know, first enrolled. And that`s regrettable. And this is not helping the Republican Party currently. That`s for sure.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: Ms. Olympia Snowe, former senator from Maine, she is one of the last, you know, few authentic, I`d say moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill. One of the few Republicans who voted for President Obama`s stimulus at the start of his presidency. But it takes up to the point I was starting to talk about before the break, and that is, you know, she`s talking about how it is not helping the Republican Party. But if you look at the state of the Republican Party when President Obama came to office in 2009, Democrats were looking at 60 votes in the Senate and overwhelming House majority, they had control of the White House, and Republicans just by basically adopting the idea of we`re going to obstruct and fight everything, we`re going to be into daily partisan war, permanent campaign mode, they won`t back the House the next year, they`re a lot closer in the Senate now than they were at the start of President Obama`s term. They didn`t win back the White House, but they have been able to get sort of a foothold on Capitol Hill, a foothold in the federal government, and they have been able to do - you know, I mean look, the government, we`re just talking about a government shutdown here, we`re talking about, you know, the sequester, we`re talking -- they have been able to do a lot with a little -- without having the presidency. I wonder if you`re a conservative Republican today and you look at this and you say, yeah, you know, there is an incentive here for us to keep going.

WILLIAMS: Well, it`s definitely an incentive if the focus of - in the whole mission is to win as opposed to governing. Right? So, if you`re trying to win as you mentioned a permanent campaign and sort of constantly be up and be won and we`re able to obstruct things, I mean yes, this works for you. But if you want to actually govern the country, and actually do something that affects American people, this doesn`t work. And that`s what we`re seeing, and so you see - and I just want to get back to the American people for a minute, because we`re talking about sort of the partisanship of elected officials, but I wonder if we had a chart also to chart sort of the extreme partisan and also the amount of people that actually participate in the system or actually vote -- and then do we weed out people who are not interested - you know, sort of not interested in that fight and then get people or who vote who are invested in this partisanship and then that`s why you have what we have now.

WILSON: One thing I think we`re seeing here is the -- a difference in interests. You`ve got a small number of Republican leaders who are paying attention to the interests of the Republican Party at large. And I would put Mitch McConnell in that category, the guy who made the debt deal that ended up, you know, reopening the government, I would put John Boehner in that category, the sort of - the Republican leadership. But then you have a lot of other members either running -- who want to run for re-election or who want to run for president in 2016 who have self-interest in mind and self-interest means being against that, which is not perfectly conservative. There are 30 or 40 members in the House who would vote against almost anything that the leadership endorses and certainly anything that President Obama endorses because to their constituents, they can`t be for anything that the president is for. And, by the way, anything that House leadership is for is not sufficiently conservative. It helps them with their constituents back home. So you`ve got that sort of divergent interest here, one side looking out for the national party, the other side looking out for their own re-election.

KORNACKI: What`s the difference between the two parties, Robert, though, doesn`t it - because I`m thinking back to when George W. Bush was president and Democrats, they gave him some cooperation, especially early in his term, on some of his domestic agenda. And it just strikes me that --

GEORGE: And obviously on foreign policy after 9/11 too.

KORNACKI: Right. If the conservative movement, if today`s Tea Party conservative movement really is just about like just dismantling the government, they just - we don`t like the government, we don`t want the government, we want to dismantle the government, then obstructionism sort of plays to their favor because they can end up shutting down the government without doing any deal-making, without reaching across the lines. But if you`re a Democrat and your vision is a little - more expansive government, and more vibrant social safety net, and you have a Republican president coming to office and he offers you, hey, -- Medicare, you know, Part D, No Child Left Behind, something like this, you`re going to work a little bit because you`re getting a little bit what you want.

GEORGE: The Republicans from their base perspective, they were sent there to do things like, you know, stop spending, and stop Obamacare and things like that. So if their voters are telling them that the first thing that they want them to do is stop, either on the spending side or a program side, that`s what - you know, that`s what they`re doing. And amazingly enough, I mean when Newt Gingrich took over in 1994, the Republicans had the House and the Senate. And an argument could be made that the Republican House is as effective or even more effective just in terms of just the House in terms of stymieing what this Democrat wants to do. Though I do want to say one other thing, we also are looking at trends that are going across the parties, like, for example, we`re talking about the 60 vote -- the 60 vote level in the Senate. That actually started under the -- under the Democrats when they were in the minority, blocking Bush judicial appointees.

(CROSSTALK)

KORNACKI: It started really under Clinton with the Republicans. You know, I think that`s -- in 1993, sort of the key date, I think, on the filibuster.

GEORGE: Yeah, but each - at each time whoever is in the minority tries to figure out how to maximize the leverage the minority has and that`s part of the reason why we now -- it is basically 60 votes on every vote.

KORNACKI: There is more of an incentive for the anti-government party, just uniformly obstructs --

ORNSTEIN: No doubt. And if you look at the filibusters, it`s like the difference between jaywalking and vehicular homicide.

(LAUGHTER)

ORNSTEIN: But, you know, it is one thing -- it is one thing if you want to dismantle government. I, you know, I watched Ted Cruz yesterday in Iowa saying, you know what we should be talking about is jobs in the economy. And I`m thinking, right, so you shut down the government, cost the economy $24 billion, put lots of people out of work, there`s a good way to get the economy moving. You know, when Cruz was doing his filibuster, a friend of mine emailed me and said, remember what the King said in "Shrek." You know, this -- in this operation some people may die, but that`s the sacrifice I`m willing to make. It really is a destructive policy. And I think ultimately destructive for the Republican Party, we`re seeing it in the numbers now, even if they can hold the House, but it is really destructive for the country. Even if you want smaller government, you don`t want to shut the economy down.

WILSON: Here is what I would be worried about going forward if I were a Republican strategist, sort of more in line with the Mitch McConnell, John Boehner trying to be the adults in the room. Looking out for the party at large. If they go through the 2014 elections and there are a couple of Senate races where conservative members knock off more moderate members, you know, something like Ted Cruz happens, the most conservative candidate wins in Texas, than ends up in the Senate and Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have a few reinforcements going forward what is to stop the Republican primary voter in 2016 from saying, great, we got this, this is how we win, we go all the way, you know, as hard conservative as possible and run the Barry Goldwater purity ticket and then end up losing 45 states. So, if I were a Republican strategist type, I would be rooting really hard for guys like Lamar Alexander and Lindsey Graham and all the old guard establishment Republicans who are running in primaries now who have got to win in November.

GEORGE: Except the way the states are basically locked in. I don`t - I can`t see any kind of a repeat of the Goldwater -- I mean I see -- I take your point and that could still happen, but I don`t see a case where it`s going to be 45 .

WILSON: 45 is too high for ceiling, for 35 is possible.

KORNACKI: Yeah, we`ll pick that up on the other side. We still have more to go with this and we`ll get right after this break.

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KORNACKI: So, we`re trying to talk about how Washington could start working at some point in the foreseeable future when you have two parties that are just -- there is very little ideological overlap between two parties and very little incentive to compromise. And I guess what I`m always trying to figure out is if this is an issue of - is there some kind of systemic reform that needs to take place, does the system itself need to be changed. Because I`ve heard the argument that basically, you know, the way things have evolved in Washington, it functions like a parliamentary system, except that our system is not designed to be a parliamentary system where the opposition party just says no to everything. Just fights everything. So is there some systemic reform or I`ve also heard that the case made that basically this is a problem of Republican Party dysfunction. I know, Norm, that`s something you`ve written about, maybe you could just talk about that a little bit.

ORNSTEIN: Sure. And, you know, half of the book is really on what can we do about it. But the fact is unless you do a wholesale change in the system, and, remember, the culture supports the system. Part of the problem we have here is you look at the first two Obama years, there was an awful lot done. We actually got this incredible set of legislative achievements, but in our culture, if it is done by one party over the vociferous opposition or the other, which is the way the parliamentary system works, we don`t accept them as legitimate. Half the country and half the political process view them as illegitimate.

So, you can`t just change the structures and suddenly expect that everything will change. But we`ve got to change the structures to change the culture. And that`s where I think the most important thing is outside the political institutions, it is enlarging the electorate and taking away some of the over-winning influence of the ideological extremes and it is changing the money system back to a point where you can`t have a handful of people and groups, the Club for Growth, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and their ilk and that`s going to happen more on the Democratic side, too, just dominating this process.

KORNACKI: I mean it just seems to me when you say Republican Party dysfunction, one of the things that I have had trouble seeing the last years is what really, what does the Republican Party want right now? Like if you had to come up with an agenda item, it`s been, you know, we`re against this that Obama did, we want to dismantle this that Obama did, oppose this that Obama did - but where is the sort of the proactive policy. I think back even like the 1990s, when it was Republicans against Bill Clinton, it was very heated between the Republicans and Bill Clinton. They impeached him. But Republicans had some agenda item like welfare reform, or something that Republicans were pushing that Bill Clinton -- I haven`t seen anything like that from Republicans except just basic opposition for the last three years.

GEORGE: Well, I mean I think -- I think it is a fair point, and that probably comes out partly because of the -- of what a large agenda, I guess, that Obama was pushing through. And I think actually you`re starting to see that Republicans are realizing they`re going to need to start putting together an alternative to Obamacare if the current system, which is - had been - has run into some problems of its own over the last few weeks starts to fall apart. I think going into 2014, you know who knows they may actually start to put together a broader platform. I don`t know whether it`s going to be like contract with America or something like that, but there definitely has to be more of a -- a pure proactive legislative agenda going forward.

WILSON: Let me bring up two possible systemic changes. First of all, last week with not too much fanfare, the House of Representatives passed a really big bill on water infrastructure. Ports and waterways and canals and things like that. There were a lot of earmarks in that bill. Earmarks are not a bad thing. The Congress has the power .

KORNACKI: The return of earmarks.

WILSON: It`s supposed to be able to tell us how -- tell the country how to spend its money and, by the way, earmarks also give leadership a carrot and - or a stick. You know, if you vote my way, here you get a project in your district. If you vote against my way, then I`m going to take the project out of their district. That`s the in Congress side of the systemic reform that has gone away in the last couple of years with Republican control of the House of Representatives. On the electoral side, though, you know, we hear a lot about gerrymandering, redistricting reform, I think there is another answer to - how you can promote that sort of engagement of the middle in both a primary election and the general election. It is happening in two states right now. It`s the top two primary system, Washington state and California, both elect members of Congress and all of their elected officials through a top two system. The top two vote getters in a primary, regardless of party, go to a general election.

The biggest one that we all paid attention to last year was Brad Sherman and Howard Berman, two liberal Democrats running in the San Fernando Valley to represent Hollywood effectively. And at the end of that race, when the two -- those two Democrats, the most expensive House race in the entire country, by the way, was one in which the seat was going to be Democratic anyway, when they got to the general election, you saw both of these very liberal Democrats trotting out endorsements from Republicans, trying to win over that, you know, ten, 15, 20 percent of the vote that was going to end up going to Mitt Romney. Well, they`ve got to vote .

(CROSSTALK)

KORNACKI: And that`s one of the things we talk about all the time is these -- how many Republicans come from districts that Barack Obama won last year, very, very few. They are all answering to Republican primary electorates. But if you take an overwhelmingly Republican electorate and you say OK, the general election now, you know, maybe is 20, 30 percent of the voters in the district are Democratic, and you have the Tea Party Republican and, you know, the more moderate Republican, the Democrats do have a little bit of a voice there in that district.

GEORGE: Yeah, but I think you`re also seeing kind of a GOP establishment striking back kind of -- coming into form for 2014 because in a certain way, the Tea Party explosion kind of surprised the GOP establishment when it started in 2010, 2012. Now some of them are getting -- are realizing that what -- for want of a better phrase, more mainstream Republicans, whatever that phrase means, they need support, they`re going to need support on the ground, whether they are incumbents or whether they are running for office, office themselves. And so, you`re starting to see money going -- going to those candidates, Karl Rove`s operation and so forth and others are -- wanting to support them as well.

WILLIAMS: But we - and you talk about reforms, you have to realize how much of our party system goes down to the local level from picking election administrators in terms of who purges lists, in terms of who are proposing these changes to voter files and things like that, so it is not just a system that happens in Congress, and Washington, D.C., but it goes all the way down to who your precinct continent is, and sort of how does that affect in change turnout and affect in change the people in the local communities, right? Because there are all the way down from election administrators to governors and state reps that are sort of doing this legislation that nationally we`re fighting against.

GEORGE: But you`re also seeing in a number of states, I mean, New York is happening too, where a lot of the states are becoming one party states and that`s going down to the local level as well. I mean here, you know, here in New York, where you`ve had sort of Republican leaning mirrors for the last 20 years, the current candidate looks like he`s going to get .

KORNACKI: But that - and that is -- that is the sorting out that we`re talking about, where it is not just the Congress sorting itself out, voters have sorted themselves out and they go top to bottom, the same ticket. Anyway, we`re out of time on this one. I find myself at times a bit overwhelmed with the news out there, both in the paper and on the Interweb. So, what a television - my producers are trying something new out. And you, the viewers, we`re going to show you what that is ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: 200 point question, this Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Wyoming branded John McCain, quote, a liberal Republican in the fund-raising letter this week.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: I can still feel the suspense in the room. That was one of the questions yesterday. What was the most intense, heated, white knuckle game in the story, a two months history of "Up Against the Clock," our weekly current affairs quiz show, it came down to the last question, the last second was MSNBC`s own Susie Kin (ph) swooping in for a dramatic victory. The question we showed you, though, is on deck for an encore appearance, in a brand-new feature we`re about to inaugurate, it`s not a quiz show, there is no snazzy prizes, or cheesy voiceovers, but it is fun and different and we will show you what it is right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KORNACKI: A lot that happens in a week. So many interesting stories in the world of politics to talk about. And even when you have the luxury of four hours every weekend to discuss them, making a decision about which of those stories to choose can be very difficult. This week, my producers have hit upon a new way to combat my chronic indecisiveness and crippling doubt. It turns out I don`t have to choose.

(LAUGHTER)

KORNACKI: All I have to do is spin. This is our new segment which means I also get to embrace my inner pat say jack (ph) or Bob Barker. They had a wheel too. But the point is, that they show you the wheel now. Our favorite contenders for the things we want to talk about until the top of the hour are right here on this wheel. Things that came up in the news this week. We weren`t sure which ones to choose. So it is as simple as it seems. I want to spin it. Where the wheel stops, we`ll talk about it. When I feel like it - if I feel like it again, we`ll spin the wheel again, because now we have entered the all spin zone. So with that, here we go.

(LAUGHTER)

KORNACKI: Our first spin, I think its price is right rules, let`s go around once completely. Well, that was easy. It did. All right. What do we got? What do we got? What do we got? It looks like, oh, that looks like Dick Durbin to me. That`s the number two Senate Democrat. So, let`s talk about why Dick Durbin was in the news this week. Dick Durbin was in the news because he posted on his Facebook page last Sunday that during the government shutdown negotiations, one GOP House leader told the president, I cannot even stand to look at you. And that one Facebook post set off just days of controversy about how do Republicans say that, which Republican said that and the White House basically put out a statement Thursday saying that there was a miscommunication. And the White House read out that meeting to Senate Democrats and we regret the misunderstanding. And they basically -- the deputy chief of staff Rob Nabors kind of became the fall guy for this. It`s interesting story to me, because, first of all, the idea of the U.S. senator taking to Facebook to launch sort of an inflammatory accusation.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. They need a vetting system, they use their own social media tool to make sure .

(LAUGHTER)

KORNACKI: I mean it was Durbin just sitting there like .

GEORGE: And putting, you know, and putting any of these guys in charge of their own social media feeds is probably a bad idea. And, I mean when .

ORNSTEIN: Call it the Weiner axiom.

(LAUGHTER)

GEORGE: This is quite true. I mean when you have got Dick Durbin, who is Senate leadership, being on a completely different page from the White House, I mean it makes them both look kind of petty.

KORNACKI: Well, he`s also -- he`s like the White House`s guy too.

WILSON: And that`s an important point, Steve. The -- we have talked a lot today about the dysfunction of the Republican Party. Let`s not let the White House off the hook here. They`re not good at dealing with Capitol Hill. They have not been from the beginning. They have had very strained relations with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi for even when they were working together and passing things. And what happened this week was after Dick Durbin made this claim, Jay Carney came out and said, nope, it didn`t happen. You don`t do that to your own leadership without giving the heads up, especially when it turns out that your guy, your deputy chief of staff was the one who threw the .

KORNACKI: And Durbin was, when Barack Obama was considering or running for president back in 2006, 2007, it was Dick Durbin who told them yeah, you should do this, don`t listen to the naysayers.

WILSON: It was stunning that the White House would put so much immediate distance between themselves and one of their best allies on the Hill. And good for Durbin for standing up to them.

KORNACKI: Ted Cruz. Although it is a little misleading because we wanted to put a recognizable photo up there. And this is more about Mrs. Ted Cruz. Not even as recognizable as her husband, but Heidi Nelson Cruz, the wife of Ted Cruz, gave an interview to the "New York Times" this week, it was interesting interview for a number of reasons, but one of the little anecdotes in here that got some attention, is that she said, yeah, Ted Cruz, my husband is on my health care plan, through Goldman Sachs, one of these like sort of gold-plated health care plans, and so he`s -- he`s on her health plan and she`s sort of stepped out this week and it is a week that, you know, Ted Cruz, we talked about this a little bit in the show yesterday, he immediately -- he went to Iowa on Friday night, I don`t know if he`s still there today, but he was speaking in Iowa on Friday night and in that mode where it is like - you know, was there actually any damage to Ted Cruz in Republican world from this whole shutdown?

ORNSTEIN: There wasn`t, but there probably should have been. And in this case, what was most stunning is the statement from Cruz`s office. Yes, he`s on our health care plan, but it doesn`t cost taxpayers anything. Give me a break. The 20 plus thousand dollars a year that that health care plan costs we finance because it is a tax free deduction. And that, of course, on the Senate floor, when Dick Durbin and others prodded Ted Cruz about where he gets his own health insurance and Cruz dissembled a little bit, brings us back to another one of the flaws in some of the projections and strategies used here.

GEORGE: There is also kind of -- also kind of interesting too, because if you want to look at the old classic model of, you know, Republican wives, quietly staying in the background, supporting their husbands and so forth, in a sense, she`s supporting her husband. Because she is --

KORNACKI: She`s literally supporting --

GEORGE: If you think about the whole generation we have gone since Bill and Hillary came in, you`ve got this very strong, confident, professional woman, but obviously very -- they`re a conservative couple, and in a sense, this is the new image we`re going to see of political couples going forward, regardless of party.

KORNACKI: We have more spinning to do in the all-spin zone. We`ll do it for another segment right after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KORNACKI: Keep it going, we`re going to spin again. Wheel of life goes round and round. And we have got -- looks like, the wild card. So this is -- we have some sound cued up. I`m going to play it and we`ll talk about it. Hillary Clinton, we have four wild card choices, I`m picking the first one. Hillary Clinton this week, was the keynote speaker at the tenth anniversary celebration for the Center for American Progress in Washington. Here`s what she had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON: What it means to be a progressive in America and in the world, to build the case for a progressive agenda, bold new progressive policies, avowedly progressive values, progressive ideas have helped make this country the greatest force for human liberty, dignity and opportunity the world has ever known.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(CROSSTLAK)

KORNACKI: I think she`s trying to deliver a message there, isn`t she?

WILLIAMS: She`s trying to drop little words in between the speech. I don`t know what the count was sort of on that speech to give people -- but I guess compared to where we are now, in terms of the political parties, maybe she is, maybe --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That`s her next game, you need bingo. We hit bingo.

KORNACKI: I think somebody told me that -- I think it was -- I just -- you look at the story of her collapse in 2008, and specific, Iraq and everything, there was room to her left. It looks like she`s positioning--

ORNSTEIN: You need a lot of context here, which is this is the tenth anniversary of the Center for American Progress, started by John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton`s chief of staff, who is still very close to the family. So this was a celebration of camp (ph) as much as it was anything else. You can take that into account and still say when you use the word progressive, all those times --

KORNACKI: It is true. The word progress is in there.

WILLIAMS: But I want to be clear that, you know, because of this -- well, she`s going to run or whether or not she`s going to run, every single thing she says, she goes to buy makeup, if it happens to be, you know, of a different color, it is going to be construed as something of her changing her mind set, changing her politics to run for office.

ORNSTEIN: Only if she progressively shops.

KORNACKI: We got one more spin, want to fit it in here before the end of the hour. Who do we got? Hopefully not a duplicate. Looks to me like a big namer?

(CROSSTALK)

KORNACKI: Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney, this is the daughter of Dick Cheney, so this was what we teased earlier, we had this question in the game show yesterday, she sent a fundraising letter out on Tuesday saying that liberal Republican senators like John McCain and Olympia Snowe, former senator, have endorsed my opponent, talking about Republican incumbent Mike Enzi. We must be doing something right if these folks are fighting so hard to preserve the status quo. Dick Cheney this week, her father, this is the Dick Cheney media tour week, he`s on ABC this morning.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He`s got the book.

KORNACKI: He`s got the book. He`ll be on Morning Joe tomorrow morning. He`ll be sitting -- I think he`ll be here, he`ll be on Morning Joe, I think he is in the studio at 7:20 tomorrow morning, so we can watch for that. This is sort of Cheney re-emergence week.

WILSON: Not only is it a Cheney re-emergence week. Let`s examine that statement for a moment. Liberal Republicans have endorsed my challenger, Senator Mike Enzi, a guy with a lifetime 80 something percent ACU score and all the conservative boxes checked, never done anything that deserves to be -- to get fired for, not only have they endorsed him, everybody else in the Senate has endorsed him. You look at his FEC report that he just filed last week, he`s gotten money from the most conservative senators, the most liberal Republican senators. All the Republicans are -- here is once again the establishment versus the outsider game within the Republican Party, and who would ever have thought that Liz Cheney is the outsider.

ORNSTEIN: Look at what she`s done, though, in terms of divisiveness, even in the state of Wyoming. She`s pitted herself against her sister, on gay marriage, she -- her mother had this dustup with Alan Simpson and his daughter, where she told Simpson to shut up, because he had been speaking up for Mike Enzi. You know, talk about driving a wedge not just within the Republican Party, within the state.

KORNACKI: And Alan Simpson wrote this epic 2,200 word essay about his run-in with the Cheney family in classic, like, Alan Simpson folksy terms. Go look for it. We`re up against the clock. So to speak. At the end of this segment. We`ll do this again, it was pretty fun. My thanks to L. Joy Williams, Reid Wilson.

Ted Cruz offered his roadmap Friday night for how Republicans can win the swing states again, but it`s being discredited in the nation`s premier swing state as we speak. We`ll explain, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CRUZ: That`s based on the oh so clever idea that if your opponent is here on the spectrum, that you want to be infinitesimally to their right, so that you can capture every marginal voter right up to where they are. The problem is if you do that, you destroy every single reason anyone has to show up and vote.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: If you`ve been paying attention to American politics for, oh, I don`t know, any point in history, you`ve heard some version of this before. The base of the out of power party scoffing at the suggestion that moving to the middle is the way to get back in the game, and insisting that long-term permanent electoral glory is right around the corner, if and only if the whole party would just move closer to where the base is. This is the biggest animating principle of the Tea Party movement, that Barack Obama is only our president today because Republicans weren`t far enough to the right in the Bush years, that they haven`t been far enough to the right in the Obama years, and if they would just move to the right and stay there, then the presidency, the Senate, the House, every governorship, every legislature, every local school committee and sewer board, everything, everywhere in America will be theirs. That`s what Ted Cruz was out in Iowa preaching on Friday. By the reaction of the crowd that packed the hall to hear him, it is a message that the Republican base, the Tea Party base is just as eager as ever to hear.

Here is the thing, though. The Republican Party by any rational standard or any historical standard is already very far to the right. The story of the last six decades from Robert Taft, to Barry Goldwater, to Nixon`s southern strategy, to Reagan to Gingrich, and now to Ted Cruz and the Tea Party. Not exactly a straight line, the center of power in the GOP has moved steadily to the right. It is now further to the right than it has ever been in modern times.

Cruz and the base still believe that the GOP is too moderate, it`s too mushy, that the only way to win back the White House in 2016 is by becoming more conservative.

Let me show you something. This is last November`s presidential election. Almost 130 million Americans voted, when all of their ballots were counted, here`s what they added up to. Barack Obama, with 51.01 percent. Mitt Romney, with 47.15 percent. And now here are the numbers for last year`s presidential election from the Commonwealth of Virginia. They have been on your screen for a while, but here I am talking about them now. Barack Obama 51.16, Romney 47.28. That is what you call a bellwether state. Obama`s national margin over Romney was 3.86 points. And in Virginia, it was almost exactly the same, 3.88 points. There was no other state in the country that tracked as closely to the national result last year as Virginia did.

We live in an era of the ever-shrinking map. A generation ago, there were easily two dozen states up for grabs in the presidential election. The voters have sorted themselves out as we talked about earlier. Parties have sorted themselves out, and now just a handful of truly competitive states are left when it comes time to choose a president. Which makes those very few swing states that are left more important than ever to each party`s White House hopes.

And of the swing states that are left, as those numbers show, Virginia now stands as the swingiest of them, if that is the right word. It really may be the single most important battleground in the next presidential election. Which makes the election that is playing out right now in Virginia a potentially significant indicator of how swing voters are processing the political upheaval of the past year. Everything that happened, everything President Obama has said and done, everything Republicans have said and done since last year`s election. The office of governor of Virginia is open, and if Ted Cruz is right about what the Republican Party needs to do to start winning again, then this is a race they should win. Because Republicans in Virginia have nominated for governor a genuine Tea Party hero. Ken Cuccinelli. He is the crusading, far-right state attorney general who rose to fame by leading the legal fight against Obamacare. Cuccinelli checks the box on every issue the Tea Party says it cares about. He more than checks the box. He embodies the movement. He came to prominence with the movement. He provided grist for the movement, and he is hitting his Democratic opponent with every weapon the Tea Party believes should be used against any Democratic candidate.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KEN CUCCINELLI, VIRGINIA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE: I was the first to fight Obamacare, but my opponent didn`t think it went far enough. Why would we expand failure? Send Washington a message and say no to Terry McAuliffe`s expanded Obamacare by voting for me on November 5TH.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: And about that Democratic opponent, Cuccinelli got a gift there, because Terry McAuliffe is a profoundly unpopular candidate. Poll after poll shows him with alarmingly high negative ratings. People don`t like him. He ran for governor once before and he got crushed in the Democratic primary. He is exactly the kind of Democrat, as one writer put it this year, that Democrats have been waiting to vote against.

Here`s what McAuliffe`s campaign message amounts to.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TERRY MCAULIFFE, VIRGINIA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE: My opponent will not compromise. He`s a rigid ideological agenda. It is my opponent who referred to gay Virginians as selfish (ph) and soulless human beings. Who talks like that?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: And if you`ve seen the polls, you know which message is winning in Virginia. Here is the latest of those polls, 46-39 for McAuliffe, and it has been that way for months now. McAuliffe is significantly ahead in this race. And barring an October surprise, he is probably going to win it. There really is no excuse here for the Ted Cruz types. This is an off-year election, Republicans are supposed to have a leg up in those. There is a Democrat in the White House. Virginia almost always elects the gubernatorial candidate from the party that doesn`t control the White House. Democratic nominee is amazingly unlikable. This is a swing state. And the GOP has nominated exactly the candidate that Ted Cruzes of the world wanted them to nominate. And it is not working out.

If this isn`t a preview of what will happen if national Republicans make the same move, if they nominate the same type of candidate, the national equivalent of Ken Cuccinelli in 2016, then I don`t know what is, but is that the lesson the Tea Party is going to take from a Cuccinelli defeat, is it a lesson they can ever take from anything?

Here to help answer that, we have Robert George of the New York Post, Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, and joining us, we have Kate Nocera. She is a Capitol Hill reporter for Buzzfeed.com, and syndicated columnist Bob Franken. Robert, as the designated conservative on the panel, I`m going to start with you. OK. Admitting the possibility something changes radically and Ken Cuccinelli somehow wins this race, if he doesn`t, if all these polls we`re seeing are right, how is the conservative movement going to interpret what is happening in Virginia now?

GEORGE: First of all, I think they`d look at the fact you have two very, very deeply flawed candidates on the top of the ticket there, McAuliffe and Cuccinelli. McAuliffe for all the reasons you mentioned before. I`d also point out that I think the poll showed it, you got a libertarian candidate that is getting 10 percent, and one would assume that two-thirds or more of that would otherwise be going to -- would otherwise be going to Cuccinelli. So I think they would look at that as well.

KORNACKI: This sounds like the we`re not going to look in the mirror.

GEORGE: And also there is also the scandal that has brought in Bob McDonnell, the governor there, and that -- the fund-raiser for McDonnell also is connected to Cuccinelli, so that also depressed his numbers as well, and then you throw in the government shutdown, which strongly hit Virginia, and it is kind of a perfect storm for McAuliffe and against Cuccinelli.

BOB FRANKEN, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: I am remembering the Louisiana race several years ago for governor, when David Duke, Ku Klux Klansman, was running again Edwin Edwards, who subsequently went to prison, and the Edwards forces put out a commercial saying vote for the crook.

(CROSSTALK)

FRANKEN: I`m not going to say maybe it reached that extreme in Virginia, but you have somebody on the Democratic side who many people view as just plain old smarmy, to be honest with you, Terry McAuliffe, who can put out a commercial saying vote for the smarmy one because at least he`s not an extremist. Virginia is -- prides its gentility almost as much as anything. And so I think that if you can successfully characterize a Cuccinelli as somebody who violates this sense of --

(CROSSTALK)

GEORGE: There is also the internal fight that went on within the Republican Party because you have the lieutenant governor, Bob Bowling (ph), who basically -- Bill.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bill Bowling.

GEORGE: Bill Bowling, excuse me. Who basically --

(CROSSTALK)

KORNACKI: What happened is the Tea Party, the conservative movement, they said we`re not going to have a state primary this year. We`re going to pick this at the convention. This is - what I`m saying here is, if this isn`t the kind of thing that the Tea Party movement can look at and say this is --

KATE NOCERA: They set it up so Cuccinelli would get the nomination, and then what ended up happening as well is the guy running for LG, EW Jackson, who is probably even more to the right than Cuccinelli, gets nominated.

I had a top Virginia GOP official say, you know, the Democrats nominated the only guy that we could beat, and we nominated the only guy that they could beat. This is -- the Virginia Republicans are generally not comfortable with this ticket, and I think they really kind of overestimated.

(CROSSTALK)

ORNSTEIN: Another important point to make here, and full disclosure, Terry McAuliffe was my student for all four years in his college career. But Terry is running as a starkly socially liberal candidate and running on those issues, he is running on the abortion issue, running on the gay marriage issue. You know, we would imagine in a different world, in a previous world, those would be killers in a state like Virginia, all these other things aside. It is a sign of how the world has changed. On the social issues, even in a southern state now, if you run as a social conservative, you`re not running downhill, you may be running uphill.

KORNACKI: I think this is one of the differences between -- it is true, they`re profoundly flawed candidates, but I think the flaws are very different in that Terry McAuliffe`s flaws are personal. The image here, (inaudible), the image here is he`s the greasy bungler, in the Beltway creature, and all these things, and it seems -

(CROSSTALK)

KORNACKI: The baggage that he`s carrying in this is not -- it is not people saying he`s an ideological extremist, not people saying his positions are out of line, the baggage Cuccinelli is carrying is he`s the Tea Party`s baggage, ideological baggage.

FRANKEN: But to the question that you ask, will in fact, Virginia, assuming it turns out that McAuliffe being the winner, will the Tea Party learn a lesson from that, that maybe they have to cool their jets a little bit? I think that the answer is watching Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz got what should have been humiliated in the -- in what he just went through in Washington, and instead he`s out there saying, no, no, no, absolutely not. I didn`t learn a thing from that. In fact, we should have just done it more. I think what you have now is a group that some people would call fanatic, that is saying no, we`re going to stick to our guns no matter what. By the way, guns being literal here. But so I don`t think they`re going to --

KORNACKI: That`s the question, Robert. What kind of election would it take, the whole reason for that elaborate introduction there was to me, I`m, like, this covers everything. If you`re a Tea Partier, how can you not look at this and say, look, we`re part of the problem here in terms of electability for the Republicans in swing states. We have to take this into account. If this isn`t the lesson, what would it take for the Tea Party to say maybe we`re a little too extreme to win elections.

GEORGE: First of all, this is Virginia and it is an off-off year election. So you can`t--

KORNACKI: That`s supposed to favor the Republicans, like in 2009.

GEORGE: You can`t always draw -- the flip side is, you`ve got in New Jersey, you know, Chris Christie on the other hand is --

KORNACKI: The one the Tea Party hates, right.

GEORGE: But the point is I think when you got a midterm next year, I think it is better to analyze that in terms of what -- of how things might play out in 2016 as opposed to an off-off year election three years, three years beforehand.

ORNSTEIN: It`s not just Ted Cruz. It is Sean Hannity, it is Rush Limbaugh. There is a meme now on the right, which is our craven spineless leaders caved in, just before we had our great victory. And if you take that point of view, you can rationalize away anything, and that`s what we`re seeing here, is they will rationalize away Cuccinelli, they will rationalize away if they will lose the lieutenant governor`s race and even the attorney general`s race, and even if they lose some of these Senate races where primary opponents knock off the more mainstream conservatives, they`ll rationalize that away. They`re not going away.

KORNACKI: And that`s the thing. I talked to Virginia Republicans who at this same convention where Cuccinelli was nominated, EW Jackson, the even farther right lieutenant governor candidate, but what happened is there was a crowded field for lieutenant governor, and there were moderate Republicans, establishment Republicans at this convention who said, our candidate isn`t going to win, we already have to deal with Cuccinelli at the top of the ticket, we`re going to give them EW Jackson as the nominee, and then when this ticket goes down in flames, we`re going to say I told you so. I`m saying we`re arriving at this I told you so moment, and they`re not - the message is not getting through.

NOCERA: The thing is that Cuccinelli actually has tried to moderate himself a lot in this race, and you don`t see him talking as much about the social issues. He tried to distance himself from EW Jackson. The message coming from the Tea Party is going to be, like, well, he should have gone out there and really stuck to his guns, and, you know.

KORNACKI: So now Ken Cuccinelli is one of the squishes as Ted Cruz calls them. We have to take a break. We`ll pick it up right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE, R-N.J.: Here`s the difference between what happens in Trenton, New Jersey, and what happens in Washington, D.C. In Trenton, we curse at each other, and then we sit down at a table and we get things done. In Washington, they curse at each other and they just keep cursing at each other. And then they don`t get anything done.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: That`s the other governor`s race that will be settled in the next week, Chris Christie in New Jersey, totally different story than Virginia, it is a lopsided race, Chris Christie is probably going to get re-elected in New Jersey. Let`s face it, the question here is margin. But the other question is sort of talking about lessons that Republicans can draw nationally and will draw nationally from this, on the one hand, we`re saying, look, if this Tea Party candidate goes down in flames in Virginia, we`re having a hard time seeing is that something the Tea Party looks at and says, OK, we can learn a lesson from that. On the flip side, you have Chris Christie, who has projected this image, and I would say a lot of it is more image than substance, but he`s projected this image of the moderate Republican, the anti-Tea Party Republican, he can win a state that Barack Obama carried by 17 points last year, he can win it in a landslide, is that going to mean anything to Republicans?

GEORGE: I think the real battle not just in terms of mainstream Republican versus Tea Party is actually Republican governors versus Republican senators like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and so forth. You have got Christie, you have got Scott Walker in Wisconsin, you have got Rick Scott in Florida, who is down, way down in the polls, and now he`s kind of had a resurgent, Rick Snyder in Michigan. You have got some people there who often have to work with Democrats, to get things done. The message that if any of them decide -- plan on running for president, which more than a few of them are thinking about, they realize -- they can say, look, we`re conservatives, we can work with Democrats, we can get things done. Ted Cruz may be ideologically pure for the base, but he`s part of the Washington problem. I think that`s--

KORNACKI: I`m trying to figure out, how is the Tea Party going to understand the success of Chris Christie? The iconic moment for Chris Christie in terms of national Republicans I talked to is the hug, hugging President Obama last year, when he came to New Jersey. Some just can`t get over that. I look at it, though, and I`m trying to figure it out because I think of Mitt Romney winning the nomination last year, John McCain got through in 2008, you look at Romney getting through last year, he was the moderate candidate, quote unquote --

NOCERA: (inaudible) so far to the right.

KORNACKI: Right. He ended up -- he enacted the most conservative platform since Goldwater. So it seems the model is not just the moderate guy can win. The moderate guy can win by embracing the Tea Party`s agenda. I`m wondering if that is the Christie we`re going to see.

NOCERA: I don`t know. I don`t see how he does that, though, at this point. He has spoken out so hard against the Tea Party, against House Republicans during the whole Sandy thing, he was raging against John Boehner and House Republicans for saying that they abandoned his state. I don`t --

KORNACKI: Boehner will not hurt you with the Tea Party, though, right?

NOCERA: Raging against Boehner but also raging against the Tea Party. He has spoken out against the shutdown --

FRANKEN: Raging against Boehner from the left, he was raging against Boehner from the left.

NOCERA: Right. I don`t see how he ever -- on a national platform, walks that back. That is kind of who he is and how he`s built his whole personality.

FRANKEN: Well, first of all, most Tea Party people sort of look at New Jersey as a version of hell. Number one. I don`t think the -- you get much guidance from New Jersey or New York.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have bipartisan agreement.

FRANKEN: Something I`ve always enjoyed is the use of the term moderates. We all use it to describe either parties, moderates, which suggests to me that the others are the immoderates. What you have in the Republican Party now is the immoderates beginning to so antagonize the business community that there is talk that the business community is going to come into some of these primaries and try and neutralize the influence of the immoderates and all this kind of thing. Here is the state of the Republican Party. You now have people who many think are the reason for the problems in the United States, that`s to say what some of us call the oligarchs, versus the fanatics. What a state of play for the Republicans.

ORNSTEIN: If you look at these governors, Sam Brownback in Kansas, we just had a poll, it may be a questionable poll, but it shows him down to a Democrat. We`re seeing some of those Republicans in the states who have been antagonistic towards the Democratic Party, who have tried to govern from the right, Scott`s resurgence notwithstanding, which still leaves him down, but John Kasich, who is doing very well, Scott Walker, who came back from that antagonistic position to move closer to the middle, doing much better. I`m watching that Kansas race --

KORNACKI: Kansas is an interesting state, because we think of Kansas as just a red - we think of it as a red state. But there has been a historical split in that state in the Republican Party -- there is a real moderate wing of that Republican Party and the sort of the Kasselbaum, Bob Dole wing. Then there is the Sam Brownback wing, and that`s the theory, if you talk to Democrats about how they think they can beat Brownback, they think they can peel off potentially disaffected moderate Republicans, of whom there are a fair number.

GEORGE: I think the Democrat that is ahead of Brownback, I think he was a former Republican. So, yeah, you are starting to see that.

KORNACKI: But the question then comes back to again, you look at these election results, if the Tea Party can be blamed for losing Virginia, if it can even be blamed for losing a state like Kansas, still I think you`re going to have as we say the Ted Cruzes out there saying, well, no, that`s not a real Tea Party candidate. We`ll show you a real Tea Party candidate, and then we`ll win, and the base wants to hear that. It is a never-ending problem. I want to thank Robert George of the New York Post.

The most overused suffix in American politics and perhaps in scandals in general, that`s after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KORNACKI: We here at "UP" world headquarters like to look back at significant anniversaries in political history, so here is one for you. It is the 14-year and two-month anniversary of Jon Stewart celebrating an anniversary.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEWART: 25 years ago today, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency over his role in Watergate, or if it happened today, Watergate gate. Many still recall the final good-bye salute Nixon gave just before boarding his helicopter. A salute Nixon later regretted because it used four more fingers than he intended. He`s as funny now as he was then.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: OK, as anniversaries go, that`s a bit of a stretch, but there is a reason we`re bringing up Watergate, because a pivotal anniversary in the demise of the Nixon presidency is upon us. We`ll tell you what it is and we`ll talk about whether anything that happened in the 40 years since then measures up to the scandal that started them all.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KORNACKI: The other day here at "UP" world headquarters, we were talking about the names of political scandals. I thought of an old one I remembered from a few years ago, so I started typing in the word "trooper gate" into my computer. And before I could finish, I have to admit I got distracted when auto complete suggested "Troop Beverly Hills," the 1989 movie about a bored Beverly Hills divorcee, who finds purpose and meaning in life by leading her daughter`s wilderness girl troop. Once I got out of that Shelley Long rabbit hole and back to searching for trooper gate, I discovered that there are actually three, three political scandals known as trooper gate -- one for Bill Clinton, one for Eliot Spitzer and one for Sarah Palin, which really goes to show you how ridiculously overused the gate suffix is used when it is applied to political scandals or a scandal of any type.

It turns out there is actually a Wikipedia page titled "list of scandals with gate suffix." I counted 130 entries on that page. Of course, one of those 130 entries is the one that started it all, the original gate, Watergate, the one where gate actually made sense as a suffix. This marks the 40TH anniversary of a critical event in the demise of Richard Nixon. It was the night the Nixon White House pretty much imploded. A battle over the president`s secret recordings sent the administration into a tailspin from which it would never recover.

The whole saga started at Washington, D.C.`s Watergate complex in the summer of 1972, when five men affiliated with what was called the Committee to Re-Elect the President, more infamously known by the acronym CREEP were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee`s headquarters in the middle of the night. Only later did the extent of the White House involvement become clear.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Seven people were indicted today. The five who were caught by the police, along with two others, G. Gordon Liddy, a former White House aide, who was until the story broke counselor to the committee, the finance committee of President Nixon`s campaign organization, and E. Howard Hunt, a former consultant for the White House. The indictments charged that the five men broke into the Watergate while Liddy and Hunt had actually intercepted telephone calls to and from Democratic headquarters.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: There were calls from Democrats for a special prosecutor, and the story did attract plenty of attention. No one expected Nixon to be directly implicated, and it did not stop him from posting a massive landslide victory in November 1972. But the drip, drip, drip continued, and by the spring of `73, the press and the public was starting to realize how serious the story was. The attorney general and two of Nixon`s top aides resigned, and the president fired White House Counsel John Dean. That hardly settled the matter, and Nixon`s new attorney general, Elliott Richardson, appointed a special prosecutor, a Democrat named Archibald Cox. When John Dean told Congress that Nixon had had multiple conversations about covering up the break-in, and Cox discovered that the president had secret tape recordings of those meetings, Cox demanded to hear the tapes, which set off a high-stakes legal battle, which brings us to October 1973, 40 years ago this month.

Federal court agreed with Cox and ordered Nixon to hand over the tapes, and Friday night, October 19TH, 1973, Nixon officially refused to comply with that order. He said he would release summaries of the tapes instead. He also ordered Cox, the special prosecutor, to stand down in the court fight and to accept that he would not be getting access to the tapes. Cox responded to this by calling a press conference at the National Press Club and saying he would defy the president`s order and he would keep trying to get the tapes.

Which brings us to Saturday, October 20TH, 1973. At 6:30 Washington time that evening, news started to leak out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are reports tonight that President Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliott Richardson to fire the special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: Except Elliott Richardson did not obey Nixon`s order and instead told the president that he would not fire Cox. This is how that late October evening became what will forever be known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history. The president has fired the special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox. Because of the president`s action, the attorney general has resigned. Elliott Richardson has quit, saying he cannot carry out Mr. Nixon`s instructions. Richardson`s deputy, William Rockelshause (ph), has been fired. Rockelshause refused in a moment of constitutional drama to obey a presidential order to fire the special Watergate prosecutor. And half an hour after the special Watergate prosecutor had been fired, agents of the FBI, acting at the direction of the White House, sealed off the offices of the special prosecutor, the offices of the attorney general, and the offices of the deputy attorney general.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All of this adds up to a totally unprecedented situation, a grave and profound crisis in which the president has set himself against his own attorney general and the Department of Justice.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KORNACKI: Nixon ended up summoning his solicitor general, a right wing former Yale law professor named Robert Bork, to the White House. Bork was then sworn in as the acting attorney general and carried out the president`s order to fire Cox. The Saturday Night Massacre represented a traumatic, suspenseful and unprecedented constitutional crisis. It also became a critical turning point in the Watergate story, the moment that Nixon lost the country, the moment his beloved silent majority finally turned on him, the moment that made impeachment proceedings and Nixon`s resignation inevitable, the moment his fate as America`s most notorious president was sealed.

Because of events like the Saturday Night Massacre, Watergate set a very high standard for presidential scandals and for scandals in general. That hasn`t stopped the media and the political world from conjuring its memory every time there is so much as a whiff of a possibility of scandal in the air. Which explains that Wikipedia page about scandals with the gate suffix. We always hear the scandal of the moment in Washington is as bad as Watergate or worse than Watergate. You heard it a million times. But has anything that has happened in the four decades since then actually risen to that level, could anything?

Here to talk about it we have Evan Thomas, journalist and author of several best-selling books. He is now writing a biography of Richard Nixon. Still at the table, we have Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, Kate Nocera of Buzzfeed.com, and syndicated columnist Bob Franken.

Evan, I will start with you. If we could just look at the moment of the Saturday Night Massacre first and just to try to appreciate -- we showed John Chancellor, that`s what Americans turning on their televisions, there were only three or four channels back then, they turned on their televisions that Saturday night and they were seeing some equivalent of that no matter what channel they turned on. Can you take us back to the moment and what that represented as a sort of a constitutional crisis for the country?

EVAN THOMAS, AUTHOR: The important point is the Constitution survived. It was a crisis, but wheels turn, the wheels of justice did turn, Nixon was driven from office, the Constitution went on. It was -- the atmosphere was a little bit more hysterical that night than maybe was warranted. In fact, the court system is pretty strong, and even the president cannot defy it. And ultimately chose not to.

But it did represent something very big, which was the press had been fairly supine for years and years and years. And in the 1960s, with Vietnam and the credibility gap and the perception that the government was lying to the people, the press got a lot friskier and a lot more aggressive. And really Nixon ran into a new phenomenon, a hyperaggressive press corps. It was slow on Watergate. At first it was just the Washington Post, just Woodward and Bernstein, the press was slow to catch up. But when they caught up, they caught up with a vengeance, and there was a lynch mob out there, out to get Nixon. I`m not saying he was innocent. He was not. But believe me, the press was eager to hang that guy. And they did.

KORNACKI: And, Bob, just in terms of that moment in the Watergate saga, when people look back at it, I think who didn`t live through it, I remember first reading about it myself, the dates never really made sense to me, in that like, wow, so this break-in happened in June of 1972, and four months later, three months later, he gets re-elected overwhelmingly -- five months later, he gets re-elected overwhelmingly. It always raised the question, first of all, why were they breaking into the office of a candidate he was going to crush in the election anyway, and how did it not really start registering with people until more than a year later?

FRANKEN: First of all, he ran against the candidate who anybody at the table could have beaten, George McGovern. And so it was preordained that he would win in a landslide. And then it was the persistence of the reporters. I think we have to agree that it was these low level reporters at the Washington Post who just continued to stay on this story. They were metro reporters.

One of the things that has struck me about all of this is that there were certain reforms that came out of Watergate. And the one that came out of the Saturday Night Massacre, not including Saturday Night Live, of course, but the one that came out of the massacre was the independent counsel statute a few years later, which was supposed to make these independent counsels completely independent, or almost so. But then we started seeing abuses of that as evidenced by the Monica Lewinsky investigation, by Ken Starr, that type of thing, so we have sort of gone away from that.

The other one was the reform of the campaign finance laws, and we ended up with PACs, which are also now being abused. So it is kind of circular that as far as the aggressive press is concerned, now look what we have today, a press that is sometimes overly aggressive or not well informed.

KORNACKI: And, Norm, just to try to understand as well that the constitutional issues were involved, because again, it starts at what seems like -- it is a bungled burglary by a bunch of clumsy guys at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. And it turns out that the entire scandal unearthed all sorts of offshoots, that raised all sorts of constitutional questions. Can you talk about what was at stake?

ORNSTEIN: Sure, you know, back then, my wife was clerking for a judge in D.C., Jim Belsen (ph), who arraigned while she was there, the Watergate burglars. And it seemed just like a burglary at that time. Then it escalated into what we saw. I remember being at the White House the night of the Saturday Night Massacre. We didn`t know if the system and the Constitution would survive. But what ended up happening is we had a bipartisan, very tough and oftentimes with enormous conflict, investigation. Everybody remembers Howard Baker saying what did the president know and when did he know it, working with Sam Irvin, then it went to Peter Rodino (ph) and the House Judiciary Committee, and ultimately you had a bipartisan group of people who decided that the president had to go.

In between, you had a unanimous Supreme Court say you got to give up the tapes. The system worked in the end and we celebrated it. Ironically it made an impeachment on much flimsier grounds much easier to do a couple of decades later. But that was done in an entirely partisan way. And it almost traces the nature of the system, moving from something where we came together in a moment of danger to one where we did something that was utterly frivolous.

KORNACKI: That`s one of those 130 gates, Monica gate, you`re referring to there, it was on that page, but actually I want to talk about too when we come back, is that idea of we use gate for everything. We have every scandal that comes out in Washington, somebody immediately says within a day, this is worse than Watergate, this is the same as Watergate. I`ll ask the question, over the last 40 years, have we actually seen anything that rises to the level of Watergate or could we? We`ll get into that right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It makes you think of some other people who were involved in a breach of trust called Watergate.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can`t remember a time since Watergate in which there was so much crossfire going on.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts of the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, oh, let`s not tell this, let`s not show this.

STEWART: If Fast and Furious was far worse than Watergate, what is Benghazi?

REP. STEVEN KING, R-IOWA: If you add Watergate and Iran-Contra together and multiply it times maybe ten or so, you are going to get in the zone of what Benghazi is.

STEWART: Holy [EXPLETIVE DELETED].

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KORNACKI: You get a little taste of what - whenever we say it, whenever there is the hint of scandal in the air, of any kind of scandal in Washington, the reference point is always Watergate, and there is always somebody ready to say this is the same, this is worse, this is it, times ten, whatever the complicated mathematical formula Steven King came up there was.

But, Kate, I mean, we have been through it recently with Obama and some of the NSA stuff that has come out, we went through it with a number of issues with George W. Bush, where the claim is made these revelations, Watergate pales in comparison to this. Have you seen anything, when you look at Watergate and what you covered in Washington, have you seen anything that would rise to the level of what Watergate represented?

NOCERA: No. I`m sitting there watching the clips from before, I was kind of jealous, because that sounds like such an amazing scandal to cover. There is the IRS that was -- with the scandal with targeting conservative groups, a lot of members on the Hill said, you know, this could be worse than Watergate, how deep does it go, and did the president know about it. But, no, there is nothing yet I`ve seen that would really rise to that level.

The thing is, is that on the Hill, there are a lot of -- there are a lot of Republican members who want to discredit the president, and they believe that he is sort of this mastermind behind all of this stuff. And they kind of get in their own way sometimes in the oversight going so aggressively after him. There are legitimate problems that happened with the IRS. There are legitimate questions to be asked about, you know, Benghazi, but does that -- they go so --

KORNACKI: How much is the experience of Watergate -- this probably applies to the media, this applies to the people in politics too. It`s like, look, there was a scandal unearthed over the course of two years that led to the demise of a president. How much of that is a motivating factor for an opposition party, maybe we saw this with Bill Clinton, hey, look, they did it to Nixon in the `70S, we can do it to Clinton in the `90S. How much of it in the media eyes, they start uncovering something, this could be Watergate?

THOMAs: It is baked into the congress and to the media. But the public, I think, is resistant. They -- Watergate was a big deal, but the overuse of the term and especially the Clinton impeachment, I think many people go, hey, enough here. The press had pretty much convicted Clinton. There was a lot of talk on TV that he`s gone. And the American people said, what he did was sordid and ugly, but it is not worth having a constitutional crisis about. And I think that message has lingered, that these crises have a slightly phony quality to them. And people are kind of -- don`t take them that seriously. They are kind of jaundiced about it.

KORNACKI: So has - that`s another flip side of the overuse of the gate suffix and the idea that everything is a big scandal, has that sort of clouded the fact that maybe there are a few things that happened in the last 40 years?

ORNSTEIN: What has also happened, is one thing Tom and I pointed out in our book, this had huge electoral implications. We saw the enormous Democratic in the 1974 election.

(CROSSTALK)

ORNSTEIN: Newt Gingrich and those years, we saw the criminalization of policy differences. Every little scandal that led up to the 1994 elections. One of the things that politicians have learned is if you can capitalize on the scandal and discredit your opponents and get things ginned up, you can win elections. You put that together with the press corps that learned the lesson from Woodward and Bernstein, this is how you make fame and fortune by uncovering scandal, and it is pretty bad.

FRANKEN: Well, first of all, I think to some degree we mis-learned the lesson a little bit, or we didn`t learn it, we didn`t provide a context. But I think this is part of a larger problem we have these days, and that is the hyperbole. I mean, everything now is spoken of in extreme ways. We have people making references to the fact that somebody ran a traffic light being something that Hitler would have done, or we have people saying that, you know, the fact that somebody yelled at a page being something akin to slavery and all that type of thing. And I just think one of the early manifestations of that has been the gate, the fact one could argue that maybe it is a bit scandalous and we could have a gate gate.

THOMAS: Voters know this, they are cynical about it. Yes, there are voters on the left who really believe it and voters on the right who really believe it, but there is a very big group in the middle that takes it all with a grain of salt. That`s inured to it by now. When they hear these scandals, they don`t take it that seriously.

KORNACKI: The other thing I wondered too, I grew up, my entire life of watching politics has been one of the themes of the conservative movement and you saw this in Ted Cruz`s speech, to bash the media. Ted Cruz bashed "the New York times," bashed "the Washington Post," bashed the liberal media. I wonder how much of that on the right, did that grow out of Watergate, of watching a Republican president sort of be exposed by the media? Did that idea of the liberal media --

(CROSSTALK)

THOMAS: The weird thing is it worked at first. Nixon did a brilliant job.

(CROSSTALK)

THOMAS: A great job, for really the first time, making the liberal media the issue. It was initially successful, but things come around. And the very people that Nixon went after came around, and they didn`t forget. And they were after him. Nixon paid for that.

NOCERA: Now we`re accused of not covering everything enough. And now it`s like what are you trying to cover up.

I think the interesting thing, the NSA situation -- I`m kind of surprised that hasn`t risen to the level, at least on the Hill. There are obviously a lot of members who are very concerned about it, who are trying to change it, change the policies regarding the NSA, but they don`t -- I haven`t heard anyone say, you know, this is worse than Watergate. This is a Watergatesque situation.

FRANKEN: I think I`ve heard that -- in Benghazi, I`ve heard that.

(CROSSTALK)

NOCERA: But the NSA spying on -- you know, taking the phone records --

(CROSSTALK)

ORNSTEIN: But the other things you could call Issa-gate, I suppose, for Darrell Issa, but it`s, you know, you demonize the president and believe that he is the absolute epitome of evil, and then you find that these scandals which you assumed must lead right to the president and be evil personified, are nothing. And it`s very frustrating to people --

(CROSSTALK)

KORNACKI: You set (ph) that mind-set with the 24-hour news cycle, it`s just -- anyway. What should we know? Answers coming up after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KORNACKI: All right. We might as well show this. It`s the reason I didn`t get much sleep last night. I was up late watching the World Series. The most bizarre ending to the World Series game I`ve ever seen, most bizarre ending to a baseball game I`ve ever seen. But here it is. Bottom of the ninth, tie game, two on, one out. Justin Patroni (ph) makes the play at the plate, okay. Look at that. The umpire there is calling -- can`t see if he`s calling obstruction on Will Middlebrooks, the third baseman for the Red Sox. They had the bad throw to Middlebrooks, he dives trying to make a catch, he gets in the way of Alan Craig, he is the runner, so Craig is out at the plate, but because he was obstructed by Will Middlebrooks, the umpire says he`s safe anyway. There`s Jonathan Farrell (ph) out there, the Red Sox manager, trying to get an explanation. I have to say, I`m a Red Sox fan, I`m hoping they win this thing. I`m now a little doubtful. But I also have to say, I think that was the right call last night. I don`t know.

KORNACKI: The rule says that`s -- you know, it doesn`t have to be intentional. There you go. A sad moment for Red Sox. (inaudible).

I want to thank Kate Nocera, Bob Franken, Evan Thomas and Norm Ornstein. Thank you all for getting UP today. Thank you for joining us at home. We`ll be back next weekend on Saturday, this is exciting, stay tuned, up against the clock. We are inaugurating the legends division, two former congressmen, Martin Frost, Democrat from Texas, Tom Davis, Republican from Virginia. They will play for the congressional cup against current lawmaker, five-time "Jeopardy!" champion, the only living human to beat IBM super computer Watson, Rush Holt. The three of them for the congressional cup, that`s next week.

But up next, Melissa Harris-Perry. Today in Nerdland, "HARDBALL" host Chris Matthews joins Melissa to talk about the legacy of Ronald Reagan and the current state of Ted Cruz`s Republican Party. That is a discussion not to be missed. So stick around, Melissa is next, and we`ll see you next week here on UP.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.END

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